Author:


Jide Remix Android tablet laptop convertible UI

Posted by – June 4, 2015

Remix Android presented on this Jide 11.6” tablet that was launched on Kickstarter. Remix presents a multi-window UI and they say firmware-level changes to Android for combining tablet apps with productivity features for the Android convertible. Jide Remix is being made by a large software team in Beijing headed by 3 ex-Googlers and it is being manufactured by Foxconn. For now it’s Nvidia Tegra4 based, and they are designing a next generation with a faster ARM processor and with a design that doesn’t look as similar to a Microsoft Surface tablet.

Rockchip RKi6000 Wi-Fi for IoT, Lowest power in the world

Posted by – June 4, 2015

Rockchip RKi6000 is claimed to be the lowest power Wi-Fi in the world, similar to that of Bluetooth 4.0 LE, it is designed for IoT applications, for Smart Homes, for smart lights, doors, kitchens, wearables, consumer electronics, home appliances, home safety, automation systems, automobiles and medical equipment, etc. Rockchip says that it can run for 35 years on AAA Batteries (when set to only ping data only once every several minutes) The RKi6000 uses Rockchip’s new ultra-low power Wi-Fi and memory technology to reduce power consumption of IoT (Internet of Things) smart devices by 85%, with power consumption equal to that of Bluetooth 4.0 LE (Low Energy), with receiving power consumption around 20mAh during use, 85% lower than standard Wi-Fi from competitors claims Rockchip. When compared with the Bluetooth/ZIGBEE standard, Rockchip says that Wi-Fi is more convenient to use for IoT.

Nvidia Tegra X1 Shield Android TV Box

Posted by – June 4, 2015

Nvidia has launched their Nvidia Tegra X1 Octa-core ARM Cortex-A57/53 big.LITTLE based Nvidia Shield Android TV Home Console Set-top-box with their 256-core Maxwell GPU for and impressive 4K gaming experience. Right now due to Android limitations the gaming is limited at 30 frames per second, but this could be pushed to 60 frames per second through a firmware update if Android TV will support it soon enough, the Maxwell 256-core GPU should support it. Advanced Android games look quite good, it plays back 4K video.

Allwinner partners with Qualcomm for LTE tablets

Posted by – June 4, 2015

For all devices with screens above 6.5″, Allwinner will be partnering with Qualcomm to provide afforable LTE Tablet SoCs accelerating time to market through Allwinner’s network of turnkey design houses, with fast component customization, offering system solution services for those OEMs and ODMs creating 4G LTE-enabled tablets to be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 and 210 processors, as Allwinner is a provider of total system solutions for the Android tablet ecosystem. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 supports 4G LTE Global Mode, with 7 mode support (LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, EV-DO, CDMA 1x, GSM/EDGE), Cat 4 speeds of up to 150 Mbps, Up to 13 Megapixel Camera and 1080p Full HD video playback on 1280×800 display.

Chromebook on ARM Cortex-A72 MediaTek MT8173 big.LITTLE

Posted by – June 4, 2015

MediaTek are showing their first Chromebook, with a dual ARM Cortex-A72 with dual ARM Cortex-A53 big.LITTLE of their “world’s fastest” MT8173 SoC with SGX6250 GPU. MediaTek are optimizing the Chrome OS performance in partnership with Google to get this launched as soon as possible, though probably not before the beginning of next year they say. It has dual USB Type-C, one of which can output to a secondary display. For the final product, the built-in Chromebook display can be up to 2K resolution, now showing off 1366×768 on this prototype. Fast charge through the USB Type-C will work. The displays could be 11.6″ or 13″, the displays will probably be 1366×768 or 1920×1080. The target is affordable pricing. MediaTek together with Imagination and Google are the first to optimize the PowerVR6 GPU for Chrome OS, trying to take advantage of all its heterogeneous multiprocessing speecs to try to optimize the performance. MediaTek is revisiting their optimization approach to upstream all of their work, soon enough people will be able to get all of the source code that they are developing to get this ready.

Gigabyte H260-T70 ARM Server with Cavium ThunderX dual-socket 96-core/board, 384-core/2U server

Posted by – June 3, 2015

Gigabyte shows their “fastest ARM Server in the world” solution, packing 384 cores into a standard 2U. Big cloud companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon could buy these to fill up their datacers with 11 thousand or 15 thousand of them. Gigabyte’s ARM Server product manager talks about the performance, the features compared to the old fashioned Intel x86 servers, the power consumption is much lower. Gigabyte will launch the mass production in November, now providing samples for validation and testing by their big cloud company customers around the world. The 48-core ARM ThunderX Processor uses about 95W, while the comparative-performance Intel x86 based server processor consumes 145W, totally the saving is about 400W per 2U system, which means a potential saving of 8000W power per server rack. Gigabyte started using ThunderX in their R120-T30 single-socket server, moving to the dual socket design to be ready for taking over the massive cloud computing market.

Allwinner V3, 1080p@60p video encoder for Car-DVR, Sports and IP cameras

Posted by – June 2, 2015

Allwinner V3 is based on a single-core ARM Cortex-A7 with Allwinner’s video encode acceleration engines to encode 2x1080p@30fps, 1080@60fps or 720p@120fps in the SoC. For the in-car DVR configuration it is featuring Car Advanced driver assistance systems while recording of two 1080p video streams at 30 frames per second at the same time with a camera pointing to the front and another camera on a long cable pointing back behind the car. The Allwinner V3 also is for sports action cameras to record 1080p at 60 frames per second or 720p at 120 frames per second. Allwinner also uses their V3 SoC for IP security cameras, to stream the IP camera feeds remotely over the Internet.

Allwinner T2 for Car navigation and infotainment

Posted by – June 2, 2015

Allwinner has been optimizing some solutions for In-Car infotainment following on the work being done by Allwinner with companies like Jeavox who are using Allwinner in the car.

ARM Cordio Radio IP and ARM Subsystem for IoT

Posted by – June 2, 2015

At Computex 2015, ARM launches their new ARM Cordio Radio IP ultra low power Bluetooth LE 4.2. It has an analog RF component, a digital baseband modem component and mbed IoT subsystem running on an ARM Cortex-M3, based around the mbed OS and mbed device server allowing to build a solution around IoT devices and to connect them to the web. The ARM mbed OS runs on ARM Cortex-M devices. ARM is partnering with TSMC using their 55ULP process to dramatically lower the power consumption getting a 40% reduction in dynamic power consumption and a 25% reduction in the leakage.

You can read more about ARM Cordio and ARM’s new IoT subsystem here: http://www.arm.com/about/newsroom/arm-de-risks-design-cycle-for-iot-chips.php

Gigabyte ARM Servers, Cavium ThunderX, AppliedMicro X-Gene and Annapurna AL5140

Posted by – June 2, 2015

Gigabyte is launching a whole range of ARM Powered Servers at Computex 2015: Gigabyte H279-T70 based on the Cavium ThunderX with 384 cores in a 2U system, Gigabyte D120-S3G featuring the Annapurna Labs Alpine AL5140 quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 and the Gigabyte R120-P30 is based on the Applied Micro X-Gene 1 Octa-core 64bit processor.

Sharp Memory LCD

Posted by – June 2, 2015

At the IDTechEx show, Sharp demonstrates Memory LCD technology that delivers high-contrast, high-resolution displays for outdoor use. They are already being used in the quite popular Pebble watch. These LCD modules embed 1-bit memory in every pixel to enable each pixel to hold state while requiring low power. This delivers an “always on” display that uses little power (only a single supply voltage is required), even when updating images. This helps designers create products with long battery life. It also eliminates sweeping images or “ghosting”, because only the part of the image that requires updating needs to be changed. The response time of Sharp’s Memory LCDs makes it fast enough to display motion video. Right now Memory LCD is thus a quite good contender for the Smartwatch market, with Android Wear being a possibility also, perhaps Smartphones could use Memory LCD also to design a smartphone with potentially weeks of battery life instead of a day or two.

Maysun shows LTE phones on MT6732 with wireless charging and finger print


Maysun is an OEM/ODM manufacturer of smartphones now shipping models with LTE, finger printing, large battery capacities up to 5000mAh, wireless charging, their RMA rate is less than 4%. Founded in 2008, Maysun has its own R&D team and a big factory employing more than 300 workers at their assembly and SMT lines, Maysun outputs Smartphones with a production capacity of 8000 smartphones per day, 250 thousand smartphones per month. You can read more about Maysun at http://www.maysuncn.com/

Actions Bubblegum-96 Linaro 96Boards.org development board on quad-core ARM Cortex-A53


Actions Semiconductor launches their first 96boards development board running Android 5 Lollipop, Ubuntu based on Linaro codebase, based on Actions S900 Quad-core 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 with PowerVR G6230 GPU, Memory 1-8GB DDR3, Storage support 4-64GB eMMC. Rich interfaces including HDMI, USB2.0 host and Micro USB2.0, LAN, WIFI.

UDOO Neo on i.MX6SoloX by Seco Labs = Raspberry Pi + Arduino + Wi-Fi + BT 4.0 + Sensors


Udoo launched their Single Board Computer Udoo Neo based on an ARM Cortex-A9 and an ARM Cortex-M4, it already got funded on Kickstarter reaching it’s $15k goal on Kickstarter in 80 minutes.

UDOO Neo merges the world of Arduino and Raspberry Pi with wireless connectivity and 9-axis motion sensors, providing a complete and easy solution to free your imagination, make your objects alive and create new smart devices and appliances from scratch.

On Monday 20 April 2015 SECO USA Inc. launched UDOO Neo on Kickstarter at 11 o’clock in EST time, raising the 15k USD dollar goal in just 80 minutes.

UDOO Neo is a credit-card size (59.3mm x 85mm – 3.35″ x 2.33″), low-cost, low-power consumption, open-source hardware board, able to run Android or Linux and Arduino-compatible. It can be used as a fully-fledged computer, as an Arduino-compatible microcontroller or as an embedded computer to build new devices, smart objects and appliances.

TI LaunchPad Evaluation Kits to get started with TI microcontrollers


Texas Instruments shows their low cost microcontroler developer platform. On the board can be a debugger, the target MCU and the specialized headers that are the same for each of the different TI Launchpad boards, some have Ethernet, other have WiFi. Using ARM Cortex-M4 and other cores, Texas Instruments also is demonstrating a complete IoT system with IBM, one of our Cloud Partnersfeaturing a variety of low power SensorTags each providing multiple sensors and using different radio technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy, 6Lowpan, Zigbee all using the new SimpleLink ultra-low power multi-standard CC2650 wireless microcontroller as well as Wi-fi using the CC3200. These are connected via BeagleBone based gateways which communicate with the cloud server for processing using MQTT.

Altera Arria 10 FPGA with dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 on 20nm

Posted by – May 21, 2015

Altera is shipping their second generation ARM Cortex-A9 based FPGA in the Altera Arria 10 FPGA, built on 20nm, running at 1.5 GHz, the ARM processor provides a 50% increase in performance over the previous generation (Altera Arria 5) with also a 30% power reduction. Altera Arria 10 SoCs support secure boot with authentication based on Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Authentication (EC DSA), with a layered public key infrastructure for root of trust support, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and new anti-tamper features. Altera Arria 10 HPS now has three Ethernet MAC cores, 256 KB Scratch-RAM, supports 8- and 16-bit NAND flash devices, eMMC SD/SDIO/MMC cards, and 72-bit DDR3/4 memory. Altera Arria 10 features the industry’s only midrange 28.3 Gbps support, highest performance 2,666 Mbps DDR4 SDRAM memory interface, IEEE 754-compliant hard floating-point with 1,500 GFLOPS of DSP performance and 96 transceiver lanes deliver 3.6 Tbps of serial bandwidth.

Bainisha Body Motion Capturing using Printed Electronics

Posted by – May 15, 2015

Bainisha is a high-tech start-up dedicated to the development of a new paradigm in Body Motion Capturing. This interview, taken at the IDTechEx event on Wearable Technology, shows some of the product they are working on. Based on a thin hyper-stretchable film version of an Inverse Artificial Muscle, it delivers a set of new and hitherto unattained functionalities in terms of accuracy, speed & differentiation. The on-body concept guarantees an Absolute Body References Frame and hence sets a new standard for Medical Quality Data. Because the system has no “wake-up”-threshold and no filtering and/or damping combined with a +kHz capturing speed, it allows capturing such minute displacements as muscle tremor, pre-natal contractions, fatigue induced tremble etc… as well as explosive kinetics. Learn more about the technology and event at http://www.wearabletechnologyinsights.com

Microdul at IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage event


Interview with Microdul at the IDTechEx Energy Harvesting & Storage event. Microdul AG is a specialist for high quality microelectronics with three business lines: Modules, Thick-film and Semiconductors. Microdul’s core competence is the production of cutting edge individual solutions in close cooperation with their customers. Their Semiconductors Group has experience in ultra-low power design of mixed-signal integrated circuits, which is particularly appropriate for energy harvesting and low-power sensor applications. To learn more about the event and energy harvesting see http://www.EnergyHarvestingJournal.com

Applied Graphene Materials interview at IDTechEx Graphene event

Posted by – May 15, 2015

IDTechEx interview Applied Graphene Materials (AGM) at the IDTechEx Graphene & 2D Materials event in Berlin. AGM has developed and patented a proprietary “bottom up” process for the production of high-specification graphene. AGM claims that its process is continuous and scalable, produces high-quality graphene powders, does not require a substrate and uses sustainable and readily available raw materials (not from graphite), AGM’s production capacity has been expanded to support large volume graphene applications. AGM also has expertise to disperse graphene in a variety of solid matrices and solutions to deliver advanced materials optimised for many applications, including polymer composites, paints and coatings, thermal management, lubricants and functional fluids, barriers and films, supercapacitors and batteries. For more information about the event and graphene see http://www.IDTechEx.com

Andromium OS on MHL Lapdock, Productivity multi-window UI for Android

Posted by – May 12, 2015

Gordon Zheng, Founder and Lead Developer, presents Andromium OS, described as a guest OS that run on top of Android, leveraging existing Android API’s as well as a new UI library to bring a productivity keyboard/mouse desktop style user experience similar to Windows and OSX. Currently Android does not support a true multi-window experience, however some manufactures like LG and Samsung have made some modification to android (ROM) to bring the side by side apps and windows app experience for their devices. Andromium takes a similar approach, while Samsung and LG’s approaches are exclusive to their devices, Andromium OS runs on any Android device as long as their device support Android version 4.4 and above. The next step for Andromium will be to release a Developer SDK and Andromium app store to the developer community, to grow the OS ecosystem.

The Andromium SDK, designed as an additional library that developers can import into their existing Android projects, allowing their android apps to inherit the Andromium OS multi-windows functionality, as well as have the correct UI elements for a keyboard and mouse interface. The Android developers can continue to use their favorite Developer environment: ADT or Eclipse, they just have to import Andromium’s library into their project.

Currently Andromium OS in on the Google playstore as a public beta, it is currently around 5mb download. Long term the OS/App will stay relatively small. Andromium can support most devices on Android 4.4 and above (including Lollipop). The Andromium OS/UI is hardware accelerated, so that users should experience 30fps or above according to the performance of the ARM Processor. For example on a Samsung Note 4, Andromium OS can play a 4k video, surf in the browser and still have close to 30fps ui rendering when moving or resizing the application windows.

For more information please see:
http://forum.andromiumos.com
http://www.andromiumos.com